Take Care Health Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walgreens and one of the leading managers of convenient care clinics, has opened a new clinic at 5000 Murfreesboro Road in La Vergne.

Take Care Health Clinics are located at Walgreens drugstores nationwide and focus exclusively on diagnosis, treatment, screenings and vaccinations for common family illnesses.

The clinics are staffed by professional, board-certified Take Care Nurse Practitioners (TCNP) who are clinically trained to diagnose and prescribe medication for common conditions. TCNP’s encourage all patients to have a “health care home” and will offer a list of local physicians if the patient does not already have a primary care physician.

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Solantic Walk-In Urgent Care could soon offer customers a discounted debit card to be used for services at all company locations.

The Jacksonville-based urgent care company will start the program as a pilot project. The debit card would provide a $400 value for a cost of $299, and would be valid for Solantic’s urgent care and wellness products. The card would be good for one year after the date of purchase.

The project will begin by targeting employers who might want to offer the card as a benefit to employees. Solantic CEO Karen Bowling said the program will begin as soon as the company finalizes an agreement with an employer, which could happen in the next few weeks.

“This will appeal to employers who are not able to offer [full health] benefits,” she said. “At least by offering the card they are providing them with something.”

Source: Jacksonville Business Journal
Original Publication Date: March 28, 2008

In a story appearing Mar 3, it was reported that an idea that is roughly thirty years old in the US has reached Europe, at least to the extent that the UK is recognized as part of Europe despite its maintaining its own currency. This idea is that of the kind of retail medical clinic called “urgent” or “convenience” care when it began in the 1970s here. I remember when one of my students at the University of Washington initiated the first one in the Seattle area after graduation, and later sold out to a large firm for a handsome profit.

The kind of clinic that recently opened in the Manchester, England area, in a Sainsbury supermarket is unlike the ones that have opened in drugstores, supermarkets and superstores such as Wal-Mart here. It is staffed by physicians, and is strictly an “after-hours” option, open only on Tuesday and Thursday evenings 6:30 to 9:30 PM, and Saturday 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM. Here, they are usually staffed by nurse practitioners rather than physicians, and are open during the day as well as after hours. [J. Werdigier “Combining Grocery Shopping with Doctors’ Appointments” New York Times, Mar 3, 2008]

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The StayWell Co. of Lower Makefield is suing a Houston-based company for trademark infringement.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, claims RediClinic LLC is using StayWell’s mark in advertising. StayWell claims the company, formerly known as InterFit Health, began using the mark in 2005, then stopped when it received a cease-and-desist letter from StayWell.

The suit claims RediClinic began using the mark again in 2007. StayWell, a division of MediMedia, provides health management and educational products to employers.

Source: PhillyBurbs.com
Original Publication Date: March 26, 2008

Richard Scott, who headed Columbia/HCA Inc. during the heydays of the mid 1990s, never really left the health care scene after quitting the company he founded in 1997. In 2001, he’s founded Solantic Corp. which today operates 15 urgent care centers in Florida.

Scott, in town this week to talk at a Palm Beach Atlantic University lecture series, says he has plans to open five urgent care centers in Palm Beach County in the next three years. The centers aim to provide care to people who don’t have a regular physician ( or need one after hours) and don’t want the expense of time and money of going to a hospital emergency room. A number of urgent care centers have opened in the county and nationwide to meet needs of uninsured and people who can’t get into see their doctor when they need to.

Unlike some retail health clinics that are staffed by nurse practitioners, Solantic has physicians at all of its urgent care centers. Services generally cost $59 to $169.

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For many years, the news on “retail clinics” consisted almost entirely of stories of new ones opening everywhere. But recently, we have seen a series of stories of existing clinics closing, in a wide variety of places for a variety of reasons. It may be that, like so many innovations, retail clinics will follow the same kind of boom and bust history that has affected others, due to the fallacy of composition.

While there are many versions of this logical fallacy, its application in this case is the expectation that since the first examples of retail clinics are successful, all subsequent examples will be, also. Such optimism has affected investors in automobiles, where in the early part of the last century, literally hundreds of different companies emerged making cars, with only the “big three” having survived till the present, and their future not guaranteed. While retail clinics started slowly, they have burst into the hundreds with predictions of thousands in recent years.

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Pilot Travel Centers LLC and Roadside Medical Labs and Clinics held a grand opening today for a retail medical clinic at the Pilot center at 7200 Strawberry Plains Pike near the Interstate 40 interchange.

Knoxville based Pilot, the largest travel center operator in the country, and Alpharetta, Ga.-based Roadside Medical announced in December plans to create a national network of clinics to meet the needs of professional drivers.

In a statement on its Web site, Roadside Medical says the “clinics meet the specific needs of the trucker while driving down healthcare costs for the entire industry through regular preventive care, practical lifestyle and wellness programs, and full DOT compliance testing and reporting.”

Pilot and Roadside opened their first clinic in Cartersville, Ga., in January.

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